The user interface (hereinafter, arbitrarily abbreviated to “UI”) of the mobile terminal represented by a mobile phone has a great influence on operability when a user operates the mobile terminal. Accordingly, the UI of the mobile terminal is one of important factors for the user to purchase the mobile terminal.
With significant multi-functioning of the mobile terminal in recent years, there are numerous mobile terminals having picturesque UIs using animation and 3D display. In addition, there are mobile terminals having UIs which can be customized as desired by users. Such mobile terminals dramatically improve convenience for the users.
Conventional mobile terminals generally have UI designs and operation methods which are different between manufacturers and models. That is, the UI is unique to each terminal and most of the conventional mobile terminals have UIs highly dependent on models. Therefore, when program codes of another terminal are reused in developing a terminal, it leads to voluminous change in parts of the UI to the program codes. Accordingly, it has been difficult to port program codes of a terminal to another terminal.
In order to deal with such a problem, a UI based on XML (Extensible Markup Language) has been introduced. Expressing the UI by using an XML file whose description method is standardized facilitates reuse of the program codes and enables to port the UI to another model. Accordingly, it also enables to deal with UI alone independently from each terminal, such that the UI can be used by terminals of different models and different manufactures.
Representatives of such XML-based UI are UI Foundation developed by TAT (http://www.tat.se/), VIVID UI developed by Acrodea, Inc. (http://www.acrodea.co.jp/), UI One developed by Qualcomm Incorporated (http://www.qualcomm.co.jp/) and the like.
In addition, with multi-functioning and high-performance of a terminal body, an increasing number of recent mobile terminals mount OS (Operating System) which can perform the multi-task processing for simultaneously executing a plurality of tasks in parallel. Moreover, mobile terminals with multi-window function to multiplex output screen displays by allocating a plurality of tasks processed in parallel and simultaneously to respective display areas (windows), have been becoming widely used.
Incidentally, Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2001-36652 discloses a scheme of remote handling (control) of a plurality of external equipments by infrared communication using a mobile phone terminal having an infrared communication unit. The mobile phone terminal described in Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2001-36652 is provided with an external control unit for communicating with the external equipments. This mobile phone terminal stores the external equipment control information for remotely controlling the external equipments, obtained via a telephone line or received from the external equipments, and remotely controls the external equipments based on the external equipment control information. That is, by changing an application program (hereinafter, referred to as “application” simply) incorporated in the terminal, the terminal body, which is normally used as the mobile phone, can be used as a remote controller (hereinafter, referred to as “remocon” simply) for remotely controlling the plurality of external equipments.